Some text from "Unsolved Mysteries" narrated
by Robert Stack, with full cooperation from the Belgian Air Force, NATO

People who read this page and its associated material
and think it is accurate and honestly done might also
be interested in reading the CohenUFO critique of Ian Ridpath's workup on the
1980 Rendlesham Forest Incident. It is a long read, but those possessing the
patience to read it might be surprised at what I found there as well.
For a summation of what I found click HERE.

In 1989-90 Belgium experienced a "close encounter UFO flap" similar to the one experienced in the USA in and around Exeter, New Hampshire back in 1965, but this time with witnesses reporting triangular shaped platforms with a bright light at each apex and a red or orange light at the center instead of the inverted plate/cupola on top with rotating with rotating lights reported at Exeter.

(jc 4/11/2007: However, it is important to note, whereas there were approximately sixty witnesses in the Exeter, U.S.A. case, there was an amazing minimum of at least 632 reports in Belgum)

What makes these cases even more unique is the fact that in one case, the Belgium Air Force, NATO division, found itself chasing something that was totally beyond the curve of our own technology. The incident was observed by gendarmes on the ground below. The facts of that incident concerned them enough to bring it to the public's attention. Together, both they and the gendarmerie made a video in cooperation with the USA television show "Unsolved Mysteries." It included gun-camera footage from the incident, testimony by Colonel W.J.L. De Brouwer, Chief of Operations of the Belgium Air Force, and was aired some time in (1991?) The following was taken from that source. Recreations of events and interviews with actual people involved were used in the original Unsolved Mystery video.

NATO'S
Official recorded beginning of the Belgium sightings:

Incident
#1

Date:
November 29, 1989 (about 4 months prior
to the NATO Military events)
Place: Just outside Eupen, near the German border.

Original
Reporters: Heinrich Nicoll and Hubert von Montigny, gendarmes in a patrol
car.

Scenario:

The
two gendarmes were on patrol in a police vehicle. They saw a field all lit up,
like lights on a football field. They pulled over to the side of the road to see
what was there. To their amazement, they observed a huge triangular platform,
with strong headlights underneath and in the middle, a blinking, pulsating orange light. The
whole thing was floating silently in the air.

They
called it in to a dispatcher in Eupen, Albert Creutz. He didn't believe they were
serious and kidded them about it but then entered the report in his log. Meanwhile,
the two gendarmes followed the object towards Eupen. "We could see it clearly
because its headlights were very strong. The could also see the flickering orange
ball underneath."

Back
at the dispatcher's office: Creutz saw a flash and looked out the window.
He could see a light in the distance. Then, a beam, similar
to a laser, came out of the light, then retracted back in.(jc: i.e. it wasn't
just a normal on-off.)

Back
at the patrol car: The two gendarmes followed the object. (no noise) and observed
the object as it circled over Eupen. They then trailed the platform as it headed
over the forest. It paused in one spot and had kind of a
laser beam coming down to the ground on either side.
Then this light, a ball, was leaving the object and coming back as if it were
measuring something. They observed this for about 30 minutes. (jc: this is obviously not a _brief_ observation.)

All
of a sudden, another huge platform appeared beginning to rise above the tree line.
They could see both platforms. As the second one rose, they could see its bright
lights at the corners and a ball in the middle. It tilted a little and they could
see a dome with two or three small windows and a light inside the object.

Moments
later, back at the dispatcher's office: Any
doubts Creutz had about Nicoll and von Montigny completely evaporated when he looked
out his own window and saw a strange machine floating about 500' away from him. It
looked like a large ship floating in the air. "It drifted in front of me for a
few seconds and flew off in the direction of La Calamine." (Thanks for the spellings Henny)

La
Calamine: Approximately
six minutes later, two other police officers encountered a similar object eight
miles to the North in La Calamine. (small village) They saw the object floating
over a building. "Then another object was leaving the
main object. It was a red light, pulsating
and descending vertically from the object. It moved around the building."
Then,
incredibly, "the three lights at the corner of the platform shrank inwards so that
the whole thing became a single circle of light and shot off into the distance
faster than the eye could follow." (4/25/2007 jc: N.B. I recently saw a second documentary on this case which included one of the Belgium policemen but did not mention this last detail. I do not know if it was left out because it did not actually happen or if it was felt people would not believe it. However, all other details presented herein were taken verbatim from the police themselves and can be verified via the video below.)

11/2009:The Unsolved Mysteries video has been removed from Google at the links I had here. It is being sold on a DVD as part of a collection with many other episodes. It's on disc 2 and runs for about 19 minutes. To get your own copy try here.

(4/20/2013):Evidentally, it is still on-line. If not, try Google videos. (belgium unsolved mysteries - the one with Robert Stack narrating it.)

I hope they leave it there. I believe it is important for people around the world to be able to easily see the history of this event.

continued:

These
sightings happened within 20 miles and one hour of each other. Eleven other gendarmes
and more than 100 private citizens reported similar events regarding that same
night. During
the next four months there were numerous close encounter cases which occurred
and have been detailed by the group known as SOBEPS (UFO group composed of scientists
and citizens).

The
following military event happened approximately four months later in March 1990.The data regarding the chase was taken directly from the
gun camera recorder and was shown to viewers on the Unsolved Mysteries video.

Belgium
1990 NATO Military Sightings(beginning March)

Related
by Jacques Pinson

Captain
Jacques Pinson, Wavre Gendarmerie, was called to a home outside of Brussels. People
had reported a series of strange lights in the sky. There were groups of three
moving together, a different color than stars and much bigger and brighter.
(Reddish, yellow, green ...ROYGBIV) After a short
while, they began traveling short distances in an erratic manner. (jc 1/12/2010: Underlining of yellow and green for comparison with Brazilian case)

At
the same time, 30 miles away at Glons NATO tracking station, radar had detected
an unknown object at the exact spot where the dinner guests reported the strange
lights. They rechecked their radar and called three other bases to confirm what
they were seeing. Each had precisely the same return from the same place. They
couldn't identify the object so they finally scrambled two F-16s. The pilots soon
locked on to the target with onboard radar. After about 5 seconds, the object
bolted out of range at a blistering speed. For the next
hour, the object seemed to be playing a high tech game of cat and mouse.
Each time they locked on to the object, it would dart out of range.

When
they debriefed the pilots after landing, the pilots confirmed it was impossible
for them to accelerate as quickly as the target was doing. An examination of the
onboard radar recordings astonished the military.

When
the pilots first locked on the object, it was at 7000 ft. Within seconds it climbed
to 10,000 ft. then, incredibly, plummeted to 500' in only 5 seconds. At the same
time, the object accelerated to 990 knots, more than 1000 mph, 1 1/2 times the
speed of sound. That combination of acceleration and descent would have been fatal
to a human pilot.

A Statement
from Colonel W.J.L. De Brouwer:

"We
measured some exceptional accelerations which cannot be related to conventional
aircraft . . . that is clear. . . . The data on all this performances which were
registered during the lock-ons on the radar, was totally outside of the normal
performance envelope of any airplane."

Another "oddity"

Even
though the craft exceeded the speed of sound, remarkably, there
was no sonic boom on the ground.

A statement
offered by other interviewed witnesses from another sighting

"The
triangle had a large light on top of it and the light circled around it while
the triangle remained suspended in the air."

jc 2/3/2009: Is there any proof or supporting material in existence today to demonstrate that what you read above were actual recorded events?

It is now approximately 18 years since the above-mentioned incidents occurred. If you missed it in one of the first links on this page, Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer is now a Major General, retired. He testified concerning these events at the Washington Press Club in November 2007, along with a number of other impressive witnesses which happens to include a pilot from the 1976 Iranian case highlighted below. (Found in 1978 Freedom of Information releases please see #'s 9-12) It is interesting to note, that pilot is now also a General.

For more details of the above Belgium cases, click HERE for a negative critique of author Marc Hallet's "The So-Called Belgium UFO Wave." Hallet's analysis has some big holes in it.

jc 5/7/2012:Additional information taken from a subsequent UFO presentation (8/24/2011) titled Secret Access: UFOs On The Record, and which had the actual witnesses testifying can be found HERE. It includes De Brouwer and Creutz as well as a number of additional witnesses including Patrick Ferryn, one of the co-founders of SOBEPS.

I had two versions of a September 19, 1976 UFO encounter with an F-4
jet from Shahrokhi Air Force Base in my files.
One was from the NICAP UFO Investigator , the other version appeared in, of all places, the National Enquirer. I was always very careful to avoid using any articles from the Enquirer so, since this Iranian case also appeared within released information from the G.S.W. Freedom of Information lawsuits, I decided to focus on the NICAP version.

"The pilot (Lt. Fafari) was unable to close the distance and paced the
UFO through Iran's clear night sky. The crew followed the intensely brilliant
UFO and noted its light was like flashing strobe lights arranged in a rectangular
pattern. The lights were alternating blue, green, red and orange in color. The
flashing of the lights was so rapid that all colors could be seen at the same
time."

"The UFO and the pursuing F-4 were on a course taking them
south of Tehran when suddenly another smaller brilliant
object came out of the UFO."

Note
two things: 1) the F-4 jet was unable to close the distance and 2) a smaller brilliant object came out of the UFO.

Out
of curiosity, I found the National Enquirer article which I didn't originally
use for reasons already given (also, I didn't have the exact date
of the article) and once again perused what it had to say about the case.
There were more details but I couldn't trust them because of the paper in general.
Nevertheless, the following statements are quite interesting if we could see the
original report(s) to verify them. Remember, the Iranian case happened back in
1976:

" ... deputy commander-in-chief
Abdulah Azarbarzin, who confirmed that the UFO maneuvered for hours over Tehran,
the capital of Iran."

"The intercept was further verified by the
veteran air traffic controller at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport, Hossain Pirouzi,
who directed the fighter pilots by radio and saw the object himself. ...The
right end was blue, the left end was blue and in
the middle was a flashing red light. The object was seesawing up and
down and moving toward the north." (Italics, colors, etc. are mine)

"....And
a second Iranian air force general, the senior in command at the time, also saw
the UFO for himself and gave the order to intercept, the controller revealed."

"....the
Phantom and its replacement were chasing the object all over the Iranian sky to
the north and west, with the UFO showing fantastic speeds and seeming to disappear
and reappear."

"Pirouzi said the second
Phantom pilot reported that the UFO had ejected a luminous object at him,
and that he was flying back.

I was aware that, beginning approximately 1974, NICAP and APRO decided to work together to try to flush out cases that weren't being reported to the A.F. due to its policy of ridiculing witnesses who reported UFO sightings. NICAP and APRO joined forces, pooled some of their best cases, and at one point were looking for more funds to enable them to investigate cases beyond their limited, budgetary means. They had several meetings to select their "best" cases for further investigation. While I was attempting to examine what was going on between the Enquirer and the UFO groups during that period of time, I was fortunate to have some discussions with Bob Pratt (see CohenUFO index) who was a writer/investigator for the Enquirer back then. He had performed his own workup on the Iranian case. I found myself developing a great deal of respect for Bob and his investigations after visiting his website and having conversations with him. Below I have notated a couple of the similar details reported in each.

I'm
not trying to say these two cases (approx. 13 years apart) were
the same object but, the similarities are at the very least "interesting." Remember, the March 1990 one is verified by Belgium NATO Air Force and National police.

Notated similarities

If the March 1990 Belgium NATO sighting were a hoax or created by the military,
it would appear the Belgium National police would have to be in on it too because they are the ones who reported
a pulsating red light that detached itself from the triangular platform in various
cases (similar to what occurred in the 1976 Iranian case - previous Belgium Eupen case is one example).

Many civilians reported the same thing. Also observed: the red, green,
yellow lights flashing in the sky at the dinner party where three or four
radar stations originally located the target prior to the planes being scrambled.

"The complete BAF report has not yet
been fully declassified, but an abridged version prepared by Major P. Lambrechts
of the BAF General Staff, entitled "Report Concerning the Observation of UFOs
During the Night of March 30 to 31, 1990," was released to SOBEPS. It includes a
detailed chronology of events and dismisses several hypothesis - optical illusions,
meteorological inversions, holographic projections, and so on."

De Brouwer
addressed the incident's significance again in his "Postface." He wrote, "We
have observed at certain instances a correlation between the data from two
on-board radars (F-16s) and at least one ground radar. The detection of identical
signals by three different systems in a given moment lead us not to exclude
that one or more unidentified device did effectively move within Belgian airspace...in
any case, the Air Force has arrived [at] the conclusion that a certain number
of anomalous phenomena [have] been produced within Belgian airspace."

Military
significance, he noted that "...not a single trace of aggressiveness has been
signaled; military or civilian air traffic has not been perturbed or threatened. We
can therefore advance that the presumed activities do not constitute a concrete
menace." French ufologist Renaud Marhic analyzed the "new rumors" behind the
Belgian UFOs in a recent Phenomena article, in which he published the responses
sent by Leo Delcroix, Belgium's Minister of Defense, and De Brouwer. "Unfortunately,
no explanation has been found to date," wrote Delcroix. "The nature and origin
of the phenomenon remain unknown.

De
Brouwer's conclusion is a fitting finale. "The day will come undoubtedly, when
the phenomenon will be observed with technological means of detection and collection
that won't leave a single doubt about its origin. This should lift a part of
the veil that has covered the mystery for a long time. A mystery that continues
thus present. But it exists, it is real, and that in itself is an important
conclusion."(jc: bolding is mine.)